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I wanted to give everyone a little insight behind the player and character creation today. We are giving the player a lot of freedom in terms of appearance. You can modify quite a bit including skin tone, gender, pants, tops, face, head gear and hair! It was a tedious process to create the frames necessary but this opens up possibilities with game play and types of loot that can be found by the player. I’ll be touching on loot in a later post but that will be just one of many ways to gain new appearances.

Besides changing the players appearance, some items will give the player new attributes/stats. As an example, you can apply the officers hat and gain a bonus to pistol damage, or something more drastic put on a T-rex costume and gib your enemies on death.

Hey everyone, I hope you're all doing well! We have some exciting updates to share about the project. We've been working on several pretty awesome levels in addition to many other components of the game.

Player reflection in the water, subtle but there. Upon completion, the player will also be half submerged in water with splash effects.​

One of the levels we're working on is a sewer based scene. Within sewers are some green and nasty sewer water, thus, one of the features we wanted to have is murky animated water and reflections of players/mobs/items etc within the water. And here is where my several week adventure began in shader coding, where I discovered I'd have to: a) write a shader that creates murky water based on a set of texture maps, b) work with our tilemap, c) only effect certain sort-layers and blur items beneath but not above, and d) reflects items above it.

With a 2d orthographic top-down based game, this isn't as easy as it sounds (unless you are really pro or experienced in writing shader code, which I'm not!). There are several premade assets available that sort of did what we wanted, but not quite. Likewise, there are several shader tools available to create shaders without actually coding them - but in talking with the devs of these, they advised it wouldn't quite be what we wanted - so instead I wrote our own water reflection shader system based on what I learned on a few game forums.

The trouble with a reflective shader in 2d top-down is that sometimes a mirrored reflection doesn't display items how they would naturally look. In 2d side-scroller games it is simple, you can just mirror everything and it looks fairly decent - however, when the game is top-down, you run into other problems with world interaction and certain reflective behaviours.

To get a bit technical, to overcome this, I created a shader that only displays certain sort-layers within Unity and combined the sprite render texture so that it also only shows the reflection on that textures where the alpha of the texture is above a given threshold. For example, a water tilemap would have the reflective shader added and only show the reflection on non-transparent pixels.

Even more, unavoidably, I had to essentially create a dummy part of the reflection so that reflective items have a mirrored gameobject. This is done through script, working with the shader, so that the mirrored gameobject only shows on tilemaps and spriterenderers with the reflection shader.

Anyway, we've got a lot more we're excited to show soon. We're working towards having a playable demo to release for supporters and hope to have that available in the near future.

Hey everyone, here's the latest news on Attack of the Dead. We've added a bunch of weapons to the game and I've gone through and reprogrammed how the weapons interact with the player/inventory in code to make things easier for future weapons to be created as we create more content. I may have mentioned this in a past post - but from a coding perspective, ideally I like to make things modular so they can be reused in the future to save time and keep things clean. And with that said, we now have a bunch of really awesome weapons from miniguns, miniak, pistols, laser guns and more!

With all these weapons, some of them are great to clobber waves of zombies while others provide more utility for other tasks - i.e. gravity gun to move things. Overall, they're a lot of fun in blowing the crap out of waves of zombies and turning the incoming swarm of foes into a blood bath.

Sign in with Google, Twitter, or Facebook:

Just in case you haven't noticed, our website allows you to sign in with your Google, Twitter, or FB account to save you time and so you don't have to create another password. This will allow you to choose a username but allow you to quickly sign in if you're already logged into your fb/gmail/or twitter. Feel free to try it out and leave a comment!

Dev ASMR Videos:

On another note, I've been making some ASMR episodes as I work. If you haven't heard of ASMR, it is becoming quite popular for relaxation. Essentially your Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is that feeling you have when someone does something that relaxes you. Perhaps you've felt this when someone has whispered in your ear and it gave you goosebumps or tingles. And with that said, for me personally, I sometimes like to listen to ASMR while I work to remain relaxed. Even more, I've been making some ASMR videos while I work on Attack of the Dead - which I'm happy to share with you. So for anyone interested in Attack of the Dead + ASMR, feel free to check them out!

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And finally, I believe Alex will be making a post in the next week or so about some of the amazing work he's been doing in creating a few more levels! Thanks everyone for reading and stay tuned for more!

We just wanted to announce that we have a pre-order function now available on your site! The pre-order available right now is very special because anyone who buys it will also be able to submit their own photo for our artist to paint into a zombie digital avatar! Buying this special pre-order will help us out greatly before the launch of the game or possible future crowdfunding campaigns.

In addition to the customized zombie portrait, the pre-order also includes access to early builds of the game! Remember, for the zombie portrait, you can pretty much request any sort of zombie type painting of yourself (obviously subject to artist discretion).

We'd also like to share our current custom set of Attack of the Dead avatars! All of these avatars were digitally painted by me - so I hope you like them. This is the same sort of style I'll use for anyone who purchases the portrait pre-order and I'll base the design off of your photo and suggestions.

Don’t forget you can also really help us out by joining the community and voicing your opinions and ideas. The game is still fairly early in development and there is a lot of room for change and improvement based on user feedback so we'd love to hear from you!

For those of you who don't want to pay a tad bit extra for the customized zombie portrait, we will release a game only pre-order/sales page at a later date.

A few weeks ago we talked about traps and how they play a critical role in defending against the undead. Well in case you didn’t know, this is not just a defense game, but also a shoot ‘em up!

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You get to pick out a primary and secondary weapon, which are selected during certain phases of gameplay. If you really like one you are able to store it in your weapons locker. Even better, stored weapons may also be upgraded!

We hope the true fun will come out when you use your weapons along side your traps. For example, a gravity gun is great to push enemies into the wood chipper for a gruesome outcome.

Hey everyone, just wanted to post a small update on our progress. While we've been working on a bunch of components from UI to weapons and traps, one of the interesting features I want to talk about - interesting from a developer perspective anyway - is finding a way to integrate mob/heard mentality into the mobs of zombies.

In the majority of zombie lore, the undead tend to form heards or flocks when in larger numbers. To recreate this behaviour we needed an algorithm for it and in doing research on this, I discovered exactly that. Boids, by Craig Reynolds, is an algorithm he created in the 80's to mimic the behaviour of flocks of birds and school of fish. Through this algorithm, a boid within a flock tracks three main parametres - distance from other boids, average heading/direction, and cohesiveness with the flock of boids.

Excited to use this algorithm, I began to implement it into the project with controls to set the weight of each parameter and also combine it with our pathfinding and target scanning system. Average direction, avoidance, cohesiveness all have a directional velocity that is combined. In addition, the pathfinding has a directional velocity that also is combined. Even more, it gets to be tricky in tight spaces where you have averages but need to suddenly narrow in to pass through a small opening. Thus, it is important to set the weighting of importance for directional velocity when considering each behaviour.

Test implementation of mobs pulled into flocks when close in proximity.​

In the end, we have created heards of zombies that are quite fun to shoot at, blow up, and mame. They will form into mobs when close together, so for players it would be wise to take care and not let the mobs trample you![/CENTER]

One of the main components to Attack of the Dead is it's trap system. We will have plenty of options and are constantly coming up with all sorts of new ways to destroy the undead.

Part of the challenge for the player will be making interesting combinations of traps. Players will need to utilize what they think will aid them during combat either by assisting with damage or diverting the enemies path.

Eventually traps will only go so far, so we have also implemented unique environmental hazards to aid in the destruction of the undead.

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We will try and make many of these as unique as possible but will most likely reuse which ever fits the design of the current level.

The world has ended and the dead have risen - you must now survive in this new hostile landscape by collecting deadly weapons and building the perfect death traps. Will you live to fight another day? Or will you fall to the attack of the dead? It is up to you to save yourself from the relentless risen dead who would love to tear you to shreds!

Attack of the Dead will be an energetic and fun re-playable single and multiplayer desktop game where you fight to defeat the attacking dead in a hybrid defence game.

We are creating highly customizable characters who you will play as through a unique and fun array of levels and scenarios. Moreover, using a deadly arsenal of weapons and traps, expect to blow the crap out of the dead as you spread their guts and gibs everywhere.

To celebrate the launch of our website, we’ve created some fun avatars for anyone who wishes to sign up and join our community!

And finally, a bit about us - we’re two Canadian devs - one artist and one programmer. We both have a strong passion and love for creating games that are fun and spectacular. We hope you will enjoy the project and we would love for you to be a part of our community as we develop Attack of the Dead. You can expect us to share updates, news, and teasers semi-frequently while we create a game that we hope you all will play and enjoy.